E.J. Dionne says “To create a real center, you need a real left,” by which he means senators like Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, and Bernie Sanders who will push back on the idea that we have to reduce people’s retirement security and instead must increase it. Of course, the same reasoning would apply to a host of other policy issues.
The reemergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014. Moderates, don’t be alarmed. The return of a viable, vocal left will actually be good news for the political center.
For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted because an active, uncompromising political right has not had to face a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged in a conservative direction, meaning that the center has been pulled that way, too.
The way Mr. Dionne frames this argument, it appears that the goal is meant to serve the center. I guess this would be a center that moderate Democrats both could live with and would find more to their liking than the current center. Of course, I think that progressives will find that outcome to be minimally acceptable, if it is acceptable at all.
For one thing, the status quo, or anything closely resembling the status quo, is not working right now. Undergraduates are emerging from college with record-setting personal debt (now at an average of $29,000) with poor employment opportunities. People who don’t have college degrees have never been in such a hopeless position before. We’re living in an age every bit as gilded at the roaring 20’s, and we’re getting set up for the same kind of fall. And we’re still not getting remotely serious about doing what we need to be doing to prevent catastrophic climate change.
The way things have been set up over the last thirty-three years, since the Reagan Revolution began, the vast majority of people simply work for a bank. We are entering the work force as peon labor, or bankcroppers, who pay for the privilege of working, and whose labor serves mainly to finance our debt.
The government struggles simply to remain open and pay its bills on time, and our political discourse is so stupid that it is a global embarrassment. With regard to educational attainment and health outcomes, our country is slipping to the back of the pack among advanced economies.
And all of this is in spite of having a president who is committed to protecting the middle class, improving education, and expanding access to health care. But, he can’t do a thing with this Congress, and what he has been able to do so far has been inadequate to the challenges we face. Obama has shown both bold strokes of genius and tactical blunders, yet, he is not the problem.
The problem is that, on any subject you might choose to consider, the right wing in this country is wrong, and they have enough power to keep us paddling in place at best, and, more often, moving in the wrong direction.
That a portion of the left is waking up to the problem is a good thing. But, nothing will come of it if it does nothing more than reinvigorate the center.
There’s nothing wrong with Dionne’s logic. He’s just saying a real left would pull the center leftwards. He doesn’t say how far left that center would wind up.
The center is there whether you like it or not. Logically, there must be a center.
If the left moves to the left, and if it has any influence, so will the center move leftward. I believe it can have influence, on account of the fact that it is addressing real, as opposed to imaginary, problems.
My problem is that Dionne is trying to reassure moderates that nothing too disconcerting will result from a more aggressive left. He shouldn’t be telling them not to worry. He should be telling them to get off their ass and lead.
One of the problems when discussing “the center” is how rarely it’s pointed out that the political center of The Village — mainstream politics and mainstream reporting and commentary — is generally to the right of the political center of the general populous. Senators Warren, Sanders, and Brown are really only remarkable for their progressiveness in the context of The Village. Outside of The Village, yeah, they’re progressive, but not remarkably so.
Damn, Boo, you want perfection or something? The fact of the matter is with a viable “left” (I’ll pass on the issue of what actually constitutes left, and how much viable left there has to be) the right will no longer be able to run roughshod. It is a first step to getting rid of many of the troglodytes that currently are set up for life.
You guys need to remember: this to shall pass. Just ask anyone with kidney stones.
One of the eternal issues of having a “real left” is finding and following approaches that can be effective without great big gobs of money. Occasional somewhat-leftish millionaires notwithstanding, our current economic system is inherently anti-progressive. (Or at least anti-economic-progressive — progress has been possible on things like marriage equality, which don’t much impact Wall Street’s bottom line.)
But of course, effective approaches that don’t rely on great big gobs of money in this culture are seen as inherently not-serious, even by many supposed lefties.
The wealthy need to get ready to make some sacrifices, because if some of that decades-long promise of “trickle-down” money doesn’t start making it’s way to the middles and poors, then what’ll eventually be ‘trickling-UP,’ will be blood.
So, they can either start to pay in some cash, or be prepared to pay in blood.
There was a another Revolution shortly after ours. The top 1% didn’t seem to enjoy that one too much, if I remember by history.
Is anyone else as tired as I am about Beltway pundits, even ones as vaguely left as Dionne, worrying about “the political center”? The “political center” is just as much part of the problem as the right.
But, nothing will come of it if it does nothing more than reinvigorate the center.
True, but nothing will come of it if it’s just the likes of Bill Ayers demanding revolution or Rev Wright screaming “God damn America!”
And none of the big economic problems will be addressed if the “progressives” spend all their time yelling about race, gay, and feminist issues.
Yelling about race, gay, and feminist issues would be progressive if they weren’t approached as simply socio-cultural issues divorced from economics. For example, same-sex marriage was presented as an issue of love, which it is, but it’s also about taxation and wealth that favors the married over the single. Poor women and children continue to scrape along at the bottom of the income and wealth distribution over sixty years after far more effective methods of birth control were introduced. It’s as if we want and need poor women and children to continue to exist.
I can understand progressives getting pissed if the pols and pundits simply want to use them to pull the Overton window a little to the left. But there is also another dynamic at play: raising the standard of debate to deal with real problems with evidenced based solutions and not just ideological chicken feed. Many solutions proposed by the hard left may be barely adequate even in undiluted form before the “center” gets to sanitize them. It’s time solutions were tested for their effectiveness, and not just evaluated for their place on some artificial ideological spectrum. Obama will be condemned because he wasn’t radical enough to go with single payer: rather than praised because he went with some half assed solution that many – on both right and let – never wanted, and which will never fully solve the problem.
Here is the level of political conversation in the US. A GOP friend of mine from school days posted yesterday a piece about a Muslim member of the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Committee. Oooooooh, scary sharia law…isn’t it just like Hussein Obama….yada, yada. For him it was a mindless share of rightwing Facebook propaganda.
I did a little searching and found out that the same guy had been an adviser to the Texas Department of Public Safety under Rick Perry.
My evidence-based solution was to cite that evidence of the guy being A-OK for the war on terror homeland security post, having passed the Rick Perry test.
My next idea is to ask their opinion about canon law. (A Methodist minister just lost his job as a result of canon law. He officiated at his son’s gay wedding.)
The devil makes evidence to suit his purpose…true Christians rely on blind faith, and the blinder the better…I wonder why God gave us a brain, and science, and education, and medicine… – oh I forgot, that’s all a socialist plot…
The problem with Beltway pundits like Dionne is that when they say “center” it generally conflates two notions.
The first is the moveable center of discussion, which the media has needle-pegged in the red zone on the right for the past two decades. Waning power of the right over the media is going to move that needle, not actions of the left.
The second is the mythical “no labels” “Third Way” center, which often appears to the the “power elite preferred position” on issues.
There is a moveable center, even in the South, of people who say things like “I thought we could get a two-party system with the Republicans but the one-party system has gotten more entrenched. It just flips.”
The weakness of the left is that it is geographically concentrated in its revival after 65 years of fairly deliberate, aggressive, and hard-nosed repression. And Occupy Wall Street’s experience in city after city shows that regardless of whether the mayor is Democrat or Republican, regardless of whether the mayor is conservative, liberal, or progressive, the police department calls the shots on political protest, and they are permissive of the right and hostile of the left.
It is still true in America that lefties can be fired and righties not. Lefties can get anonymous death threats and righties not. Lefties get harassed by law enforcement and righties not. All of which serves to make politicians crowd rightward. And the same politicians then ask lefties to show more strength and then maybe they’ll pay attention to them.
Until Dionne exposes the rigged game in American ideological politics, the center he is appealing to is quite content with the status quo. Even though the status quo is leading to destruction of the economy and the environment and also to democracy.
I don’t really see why the “moderates” need to be alarmed. If you look at the actual policies these senators are talking about, it isn’t exactly “All power to the soviets!” In fact, it’s mostly things that we’ve done before, and that have worked, like regulating banks. Progressive taxation.
At a certain point “left” and “right” are just labels, and eventually they outlive their usefulness.